US ABSTENTION SAID TO BE A WARNING TO ISRAEL

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

The Security Council meets at the United Nations headquarters to discuss the Gaza fighting

UN experts said the US abstention on Thursday night's Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza should be viewed as a warning to Israeli leaders that Washington's patience may be running thin.

Outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who spent three days in New York shuttling between conference chambers with her cell phone clutched tightly in her hand to help broker a deal between Arab nations and Western powers, told reporters Friday that the abstention was meant as an endorsement of the multilateral peace talks taking place in Cairo.

"It was simply believed that this might have been a little premature," Rice said at a briefing, referring to the British-sponsored resolution.
She said that she did not believe the final text implied any equivalence between Israeli, a UN member state, and Hamas, which she described as "a terrorist organization," but said she felt it was important for the Security Council to articulate its "condemnation of all acts of terrorism."

Veteran UN watchers told The Jerusalem Post that the Americans' unwillingness to veto the British resolution, whose text was amended to reflect the concerns of Arab leaders, was unusual. "The fact that the US didn't veto is a victory, of sorts," said Warren Hoge, a former New York Times UN bureau chief who now works at the International Peace Institute, a think-tank that conducts research on UN affairs and conflict resolution.

The US vetoed an earlier Security Council statement, proposed by Libya, condemning the outbreak of violence in Gaza, objecting to the "unbalanced" equation of Hamas shelling with the Israeli military operation.
But Rice arrived in New York apparently committed to seeing through a Security Council measure, despite repeated Israeli insistence that it would not accept any resolution as binding.
Source: Jerusalem Post